Four Words: The Title Trivia Quiz

Answer: The Grapes of Wrath

In John Steinbeck's novel "The Grapes of Wrath" the Joad family are struggling for survival because the "Dust Bowl" droughts have destroyed the lands they farmed in Oklahoma. They are crushed at every turn, and the implication is that wrath will be the result when such oppression is allowed.

The line about the "grapes of wrath" in the Civil War anthem "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" - written by Julia Ward Howe - is itself an allusion to Revelation 14:19-20 in the New Testament. "Of Mice and Men" is another novel by Steinbeck, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962.

The other two choices are song titles.

Answer: As I Lay Dying

The line in Homer's Greek epic The Odyssey comes in Book XI where the shade of Agamemnon complains to Odysseus: "As I lay dying, the woman with the dog's eyes would not close my eyes as I descended into Hades." Presumably, this woman is Clytemnestra, Agamemnon's wife and murderer. Faulkner's novel is narrated by fifteen different characters, including - like Agamemnon - the dead person herself. William Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949.

He also wrote "The Sound and the Fury" and "A Light in August"; "The Things They Carried" was written by Tim O'Brien.

Answer: A Farewell to Arms

The persona of the poem "A Farewell to Arms" - not to be confused with its author George Peele (1556-96) - comes across as a loyal, aging soldier who wants to serve his queen to the end, as in the second stanza:

"His helmet now shall make a hive for bees;
And, lovers' sonnets turn'd to holy psalms,
A man-at-arms must now serve on his knees,
And feed on prayers, which are Age his alms:
But though from court to cottage he depart,
His Saint is sure of his unspotted heart."

In Ernest Hemingway's "A Farewell to Arms", World War I soldier Fredric Henry falls in love with his chosen "queen" Catherine Barkley. He is injured, misjudged, and experiences other tragic events, so the rain at the end is appropriately symbolic. Hemingway wrote "The Sun Also Rises" about American expatriates in Europe during the 1920s; "A Tale of Two Cities" is by British novelist Charles Dickens, while "God Save the Queen" is the British national anthem, not a novel.

Answer: Tender Is the Night

Both Fitzgerald's novel and Keats's poem have autobiographical elements. Keats was ill with tuberculosis when he wrote "Ode to a Nightingale" - a poem that contrasts the beautiful sounds of a songbird with overwhelming thoughts of death. Fitzgerald's wife Zelda was hospitalized with schizophrenia as he was writing "Tender is the Night" - his last complete novel.

The protagonist of Fitzgerald's "Tender is the Night" is a psychoanalyst who has married his patient, but the doctor himself is losing control, in spite of the beautiful setting of the story. "The Day of the Locust" was written by Nathaniel West, "To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee, and "The House of Mirth" by Edith Wharton.

Answer: All the King's Men

The main character of "All the King's Men" is Willie Stark, a demogogue and corrupt politician. Like the nursery rhyme character Humpty Dumpty, his rise is high and has catastrophic consequences. Robert Penn Warren claimed that Willie Stark was not Louisiana's "Kingfish" Gov. Huey P. Long, but the similarities are too striking for coincidence, and as a professor at LSU, Warren was submerged in the social and political climate of the "rise of the redneck" in the American South of the 1930s. "A Confederacy of Dunces" is a novel by John Kennedy Toole, also set in Louisiana, published posthumously in 1980; "The Egg and I" was a popular memoir by Betty MacDonald, published in 1945; and "Breakfast of Champions" is a 1973 novel by Kurt Vonnegut; .

Answer: The Sun Also Rises

"The Sun Also Rises" is the famous Hemingway novel that takes its expatriate American and British characters from the night clubs of Paris to the running of the bulls and the romance of the bullfighting ring in Pamplona. Read in context, the passage from the first chapter of the Biblical book of Ecclesiastes shows how the allusion of Hemingway's title fits a novel about the "Lost Generation" of the 1920s: "One generation passes away, and another generation comes; But the earth abides forever. The sun also rises, and the sun goes down, And hastens to the place where it arose.

The wind goes toward the south, And turns around to the north; The wind whirls about continually, And comes again on its circuit" (NKJV). In Ecclesiastes "all is vanity" - meaningless. Like the wind in verse six, Hemingway's characters "whirl about continually" trying to squeeze some pleasure out of a post World War I life that seems to have no purpose.

Hemingway also wrote "A Farewell to Arms"; "House Made of Dawn" is by Native American writer N. Scott Momaday; and "The Time Traveler's Wife" is by Audrey Niffenegger.

Answer: The Age of Innocence

"The Age of Innocence" won the Pulitzer Prize for Edith Wharton in 1921, the first awarded to a woman, but the novel is set in the high society of wealthy and elegant 1870s New York, with side trips to other haunts of this rich circle of the elite, like Europe and Newport, Rhode Island. By breaking the unwritten rules of this society, seeking a divorce and treating "inferiors" with respect, Countess Ellen Olenska throws the fiance of her cousin off-balance, and he falls in love with her, even after rushing his marriage to avoid an affair.

The allusion is to a Joshua Reynolds painting, now in the Tate Gallery, which is called "The Age of Innocence" and portrays a very young girl with hands folded at her chest. "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" is a 1924 novel by Betty Smith; "Portrait of a Lady" by Henry James was published in the 1880s; and "To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee appeared in 1960.

Answer: From Here to Eternity

James Jones's novel title "From Here to Eternity" comes from Rudyard Kipling's poem "Gentleman Rankers" which goes in part: "We're poor little lambs who've lost our way. Baa! Baa! Baa!....Gentlemen-rankers out on a spree, Damned from here to Eternity, God ha' mercy on such as we, Baa! Yah! Bah!" In a slightly adapted form, the lyrics were set to music and sung at the American Ivy League college Yale in the early 20th century, and acquired the new title "The Whiffenpoof Song". Gentlemen rankers were enlisted men who by background and education should have been officers, a situation that is reflected in the novel by able soldiers of experience and intelligence who come into conflict with their less capable officers.

Answer: What Dreams May Come

Matheson imagines a dreamlike but very real afterlife in which the husband must rescue his wife from a cold, dark hell, because she has committed suicide. Shakespeare's character Hamlet is contemplating suicide when he speaks the soliloquy that begins "To be or not to be, that is the question" (3.1.55-85). In the middle of the speech, he explains that to die may be like going to sleep, but that isn't a comforting thought, because sleep brings dreams:

"To die, to sleep;
To sleep, perchance to dream - ay, there's the rub:
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause."

Answer: Gone with the Wind

In the novel "Gone with the Wind" Margaret Mitchell creates the character Scarlett O'Hara, whose fiery but often misguided passion leads her into unwise actions, but also helps her to survive loss and tragedy. The male speaker of Ernest Dowson's poem justifies his unfaithfulness to Cynara by calling it just the opposite, but he shares a similarly passionate nature with Scarlett:

I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind,
Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng,
Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind;
But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, all the time, because the dance was long:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

Dowson, in turn, is borrowing from the Latin poet Horace in this poem with the title "Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae sub Regno Cynarae": "I am not as I was under the reign of the good Cynara."